Wednesday, October 21, 2015

MisSpelled: The Witchy Web Series Everyone Should Watch

Five actresses of color can tell you what casting directors think when they see them:

A bully, the background friend, a massuese, manicurist, prostitute, thug, young mom, maid, the sassy best friend. Added is the concept that none of these characters offer any real depth. This is commonly, if not always, actresses of color who are burdened with these suffocating depictions. One can imagine bleak claustrophobia when it comes to anything genre-related. Even a Oscar award winner is confined to a CGI alien in the new Star Wars movie. Assessing this landscape and deciding to take the extra step in creating your own content to map your own vision in our digital age takes a lot of patience and hustle. If we get products such as web series MisSpelled, than this is a welcomed trend.

Lindsey McDowell, writer, creator, and star of MisSpelled, a series the CW could benefit from is one of those visionaries. Where there could easily be flaws in the limits of budget and experience, there is only the essence of exceptionalism. Quirky and complicated with an air of equity, chemistry, in addition to the model balance of light and darkness, Stella (Carina Perez), Gladys (McDowell), Emma (VyVy Nguyen), Nina (Gabriela Banus), and Quinn (Chelsea Jones; all pictured above) are as natural as their powers that they learn to control and ultimately bind them.

With one recent tweet from a feature I wrote on the series in July 2014, over 15,000 people were reached with hundreds of retweets wielding reactions like, "This exists?!" and "Well THATS going on the top of my list". As McDowell puts it, "Our audience is always growing. One of my favorite things to do is to scroll through everyone's avatars and see our fans little faces. We have a super diverse audience and the hunger for a show with representation of different people with different skin tones and different body types is something I can relate to. I can't always speak for all of my cast but for sure we all feel extremely grateful and accepted."

After two crowdfunding runs on Kickstarter and Indiegogo, the cast and crew surprised a few of us on social media with some behind-the-scenes going about's on Periscope, blog posts, video specials and more. Now MisSpelled is officially back with new episodes and I couldn't be more excited! McDowell discussed the hurdles of funding and marketing to achieve this goal: "We received a lot of support from our friends, family and fans. It felt really good and pretty soon after we met an investor who wanted to partner with us. We've been holding out on new MisSpelled in hopes we'd be able to put out a full-nother (that's not a real word) six episodes. We just don't have the funds for it unless we are funded so the coming episodes are actually our Indiegogo money + some savings + family donations.

I feel a tremendous responsibility to our donors and fans to still kick ass with the resources we have. And I promise, we have! A lot of favors went into these next two episodes. It's going to be awesome. As for outside funding - we are still in contracts with them and have spoken to some sponsors they have secured but it takes a lot longer than you'd think. Hopefully everyone stays tuned!

I think what motivates a lot of our crew is the audience and what their work has garnered. A lot of us have moved out here to be in something and sometimes we are a part of things that aren't fun or simply never get released. I think this is fun for them because people are liking what they are bringing to the project. It only makes us want to do more. Cast is the same. We all have a desire to tell stories and when we have ride or die fans like we have listening to those stories? We ride with them!"

If this is your first glimpse at MisSpelled, be sure to bookmark the YouTube channel and catch up on the first four episodes.

Brand new installments are coming your way beginning this Friday, October 23 and look for episode 6 on Friday, October 30th!